“Mohammed Sami does not paint people… Instead, he is an artist of places and things—interiors, cities, clothing, potted plants—and of the traces, both material and psychological, that trauma leaves behind. He is also an artist of memory, allegory and truth.”
Mohammed Sami’s Poor Folk II from 2019 is an evocative example of the artist’s paintings contemplating the lasting impacts of conflict and trauma. Drawing from his experiences growing up in war-ridden Iraq and following relocation to Europe, Sami paints elegant compositions suffused with emotion from an oblique and disquieting perspective. In the present work, Saddam Hussein’s portrait is revealed yet never fully visible, distorted by foreshortening on the left edge of the canvas while reflected in a shattered mirror on the right. This threatening yet partially obscured image epitomizes the artist’s characteristic indirect references to moments of crisis that bring nuance to our understanding of conflict and its effects: “Sami does not simply reflect on his difficult past or glorify his newfound freedom. He plays with pictorial convention, subverting the viewer’s expectation of pleasing claritys and depth to articulate the ambivalence of the refugee experience: escape and loss, liberation and destruction are intertwined.” (Michael Kurtz, “Mohammed Sami: The Point 0,” The Burlington Magazine, 5 April 2023 (online)) Test.mes nt to the expressive powers of his practice, Sami was recently the subject of a major exhibition at Blenheim Palace in England and his paintings can be found in prestigious institutional collects ions around the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate, London; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among others.
Approaching the present work, the viewer’s gaze is drawn to the bright yellow and celadon green of the walls, blending into near-abstract geometric configurations alongside the foreboding dark of the ceiling and floor. At the center of the room, above a disordered mattress with ruffled sheets, is a curtain of floral patterning, a literal covering preventing the viewer from seeing the realities beyond its windows, forcing our gaze towards the fractured image of Sadaam: “This is the type of signifier I use to hide the traumatic image behind something entirely different, like cactus or the carpet on the floor. This helps to distract you from the main subject matter, which is trauma and conflict.” (the artist quoted in: Elizabeth Fullerton, “‘I hide the traumatic image behind a cactus or carpet’ - the paintings of Iraqi exile Mohammed Sami,” The Guardian, 21 March 2022 (online)) Trauma and conflict materialize in Saddam’s poster, reflected through a shattered mirror that complicates our understanding of space; the fragmentation of the mirror and the spatial composition mirror the inherently fractured and disjointed process of remembering, at once evoking the familiarity of memories and the strangeness of dreams.
Sami's perspectival techniques, at t.mes s zooming into details in sharp focus and at others taking a step back until individual forms blend into wider patterns, underscore the disquieting details that underline his paintings. His depictions of domestic spaces through multi-perspectival and compartmentalized spatial configurations recall the visual grammar of Islamic miniature painting or the patterned interiors of the Nabi. Sami even nods at contemporary Arab political discourse which uses euphemism, allegory, and metonymy as conceptual strategies to mask criticisms of authority, interrogating the impacts of pain and suffering through not only what is present but what is absent. In Sami’s words: “The power of invisibility has always been stronger for me than the power of visibility.” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Camden Arts Centre (and traveling), Mohammed Sami: The Point 0, 2023, n.p.)
In the present work, meaning and power lie outside the composition—the room is an allegory of events that have happened or are soon to happen. In many ways, it is this paradox that forms the core of Sami’s practice. Informed by pain and conflict yet resplendent in technical skill and aesthetic sensitivity, Sami’s paintings operate in the gap between memory and invention, never fully showing the viewer which is which. As the artist has remarked, “My paintings seek to capture the state of confusion that occurs because of the cut thread between reality and the imagination; between war narrated and war witnessed.” (Mohammed Sami quoted in: Sohrab Mohebbi, “Mohammed Sami in conversation with Sohrab Mohebbi, June 2021,” File Note 144: Mohammed Sami, Camden Art Centre, June 2021, online) Avoiding the use of photographs, sketches, or other source material, Sami’s process relies entirely on the process of remembering—his work is about belated memory, or belated response to memory. In this way, the canvas becomes a space in which feelings, moments, incidents, and places emerge and resurface, transformed by the inherent mutability of memory and the process of forgetting.
